The best of Japanese PC gaming week

A week of stories about Japanese games and how they've found a new home on PC.

Three years ago, shortly after I started working at PC Gamer, I wanted to write something big about Japanese games on PC. It was an exciting time. There were Final Fantasy games on PC! Dark Souls 2 had just come out with a PC port that looked and played better than it did on consoles! It seemed like the unthinkable was happening, and I wanted to write about this seeming turning point for Japanese games on PC. So I started talking to developers in Japan and the US... and then I got sidetracked. For about two years.

Thankfully, the story has only gotten better since then. A lot has happened for Japanese PC gaming in the past three years: old RPGs have found a new audience, new action games have sold just as well as on consoles, once-niche genres like visual novels have gotten more official translations than ever before and sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Even SHMUPs are back. 2017 has broadly felt like the year the Japanese industry gets itself back on track, recovering from the challenges of expensive HD console development and a shrinking audience at home. But on the PC, things have been great for awhile—Japanese games have already been on the upswing for years.

Here are all the features we wrote during Japanese PC gaming week. Enjoy!

The stories

How Japan learned to love PC gaming again — This is a big one, with tons of insight from the developers who made this trend a reality over the past seven years. It's part recent history, and part deep dive into all the reasons PC gaming took this long to catch on.

The forgotten origins of JRPGs on the PC — The little-known history of early Japanese PC RPGs like 'Seduction of the Condominium Wives' and how they set the stage for the likes of Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy.

The surprising explosion of RPG Maker on Steam — A few years ago, RPG Maker was a fan tool. Now it powers more than 100 games released on Steam every year. We talked to developers about how it happened and the stigma that still surrounds RPG Maker games.

Japanese games we want on PC — More games are making their way to PC than ever, but there's still a back catalog of underappreciated Japanese games that deserve a second day in the sun on PC. Plus, you know, Persona 5.